As I write this today, my alma mater, the school of whom I have been a fan
since my good old prenatal days, is sitting at #2 in the ISR's. Now, you
probably can't tell it from my writing, where everything is deadpan anyway,
but I'm not the most excitable guy around. Nonetheless, I'm starting to
believe in this team and swallow some of the KoolAid, and that's a
dangerous thing, since I know there might be some heartache in that
direction. Nonetheless, so far, this looks like a great team to me, one
that can easily stand with 1985 and 1989 as the best in school history.

Now, you're not here to listen to me rant about my team, but in my quest to
decide just how much of that KoolAid to swallow, there's a good general
question: Just how good is it to be in the top 5 on March 31? I mean,
after this weekend we're halfway through the season, so it's got to mean
something, right? The top 5 is about the range that contains the
contenders for the title, so that's a reasonable place to look.

At first glance, the news is good. Of the 40 teams who were in the top
5 after March 31 between 1998 and 2005, 25 of them finished the season,
postseason included, in the top 5 (all of these rankings are ISR's, of
course). Now, using 3/31 is a bit of a cheat, since the end of the season
has moved back a bit since 1998, but it's not a big enough difference to
bother adjusting for it. Having established that the general case looks
pretty good, let's cater to my doomsday-prone personality and look at the
downside. What are the biggest falls by teams in the top 5?

I'm looking at the ordinal rankings rather than the raw ratings because
there's an interesting effect where a couple of teams have fallen a long
way in the raw ISR's and still stayed at #1 because they were so far ahead
at this point -- one team (Texas, 2002) actually managed to fall around 8
ISR points and move from #2 to #1 because the team in front of them fell
even further.

Given that, it looks like even the downside is a top 20 finish. That's
not enough for the way I'm feeling, but it's a good floor to things.

While we're at it, what's the furthest down anyone has come to hit the
top 5?

You'll notice that a couple of these won the whole thing, so don't give up
hope if your team's still hanging around the lower half of the top 25.

Tournament Watch

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament.
I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since
the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one
team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the
automatic bid.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.